The bakers risking their lives to bring Gaza their daily bread

The Ajjour family own five branches of their bakery but the one in Gaza City is the only one functioning. “Most of our branches were completely or partially destroyed,” Mahfouz said.

The Gaza city branch was closed for a long time because of a lack of ingredients and equipment. It reopened on April 13, just as the besieged territory teetered on the brink of famine.

Under mounting international pressure to alleviate civilian suffering, Israel opened an additional crossing to allow in more humanitarian aid, including parcels of fuel and wheat flour to make bread, the first since the start of the war.

But the tide may have turned again this month with the closure of a vital border crossing, a lack of aid lorries entering the territory and the failure of the US military’s floating pier to bring in more supplies, leaving residents without a lifeline.

For now, hundreds of people queue along blue barricades as they wait, sometimes all day, to be served at the metal grille window, where they will be handed an orange plastic bag of bread for five Israeli shekels (about £1.05). It’s not enough to cover the bakery’s costs but families depend on it to live. Before the subsidy bread might have cost twenty times more.

“In light of the lack of vegetables, fruits or meat available in Gaza, we are forced to stand here for long hours to get a bag of bread so that we can return to our children without disappointment,” Ihab Al-Swerky, 37, said. “I cannot describe my joy in getting a bag of bread.”

Customers queue for hours to get hold of a bag of bread, costing about £1.05 — much less than they were paying before the subsidised bakery reopened

This bag of bread, which quickly sweats in the plastic bag, is a far cry from the heavy croissants, stuffed pastries and traditional flatbreads topped with salty, seedy za’atar that the bakery made in peacetime. But when it reopened large crowds gathered in gratitude.

A few more bakeries have since opened in the area, though nowhere close to the 140 operating before the war.

Omar Abu Ghosh, 14, walked for more than an hour to get to Ajjour, his nearest bakery, and then queued for another hour for a bag of bread. “Before bakeries returned to work again we used to eat animal feed, and my mother tried to make bread from it but it tasted very bad,” he said. “But we ate it to stave off starvation.”

Now his mother rotates the family members she sends to fetch bread.

“My mother is afraid when I go because the bombing is continuing,” he said. “Sometimes my younger brother goes and sometimes my father. The road can be dangerous because the streets contain the rubble of destroyed buildings and it is impossible for cars to pass through them.”

Omar Abu Ghosh, 14, was pleased to be able to take a bag home to his family, who previously had to eat animal feed

The bakery is close to Salah al-Din street, Gaza’s main traffic artery, which runs from north to south through the Strip. It has been the location of deadly attacks on civilians and aid convoys. The UN warned recently that the area between Salah al-Din street and the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south of Gaza was particularly dangerous, despite a daytime pause in fighting.

Ajjour’s 35 workers wake at the crack of dawn to bake. To minimise risk, they make sure to be done before nightfall, so they do not have to travel in the dark.

“We begin by preparing the amount of flour that has arrived to us through international organisations, especially from the [UN] World Food Programme, and we knead the bread and then bake it so that the citizens who come will get bread early,” Mahfouz said. “We work according to the arrival of aid and fuel. If they stop working, we stop working.” The bakery uses the WFP donations to subsidise its products. “There are thousands of citizens who want bread but the quantities of flour are limited, so we cannot meet all people’s requests.”

“Since the beginning of the war, we have suffered from an inability to obtain a bag of bread. These bags of flour were not available to the northern Gaza Strip before,” Abu Omar Badriya, a newly displaced resident of central Gaza, said as he stood in line at Ajjour at the weekend. “In the war, my only job is to search for a bag of bread and go home to feed my children.”

Before the war, Ajjour’s shelves were loaded with baked delicacies

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But the chance to stand in line for hours for fresh bread may be dwindling.

The WFP runs more than 70 community kitchens across Gaza, and 17 bakeries, of which almost half are closed. It said last week that Gaza was on the verge of a “massive public health crisis” because of the lack of clean water, food and medical supplies in the extreme heat. Limited access has created a backlog in deliveries of aid, with food spoiling at marshalling areas because it is not reaching warehouses.

“Fighting is not the only reason for being unable to pick up aid,” Farhan Haq, a UN spokesman, said. “The lack of any police or rule of law in the area makes it very dangerous to move goods there.”

In northern Gaza in February, aid groups stopped their food deliveries amid chaos and violence following the collapse of civil order.

The closure of Rafah, the only land crossing not controlled by Israel, and the limited access at Kerem Shalom in the south have raised fears that aid deliveries will fail to meet the needs of the territory’s population of 2.3 million.

Mahfouz says nothing is predictable in Gaza. “We are afraid of the future, where the continued entry of aid is not guaranteed, preserving the bakery from bombing is not guaranteed, and preserving the lives of workers and citizens is not guaranteed.”